Women and the death penalty

Sep 25, 2010 Editorial

On Thursday a woman met her death in a United States penitentiary. She had arranged for two men to enter her home and kill her husband and stepson over money—insurance money that was slightly less than $300,000 or the equivalent of $60 million in our currency.
Reports are that just before the woman finalized the details of her husband’s death, she knelt with him in prayer then went to bed. She reportedly left the door open so that there would be no forced entry and disturbing noise. To get the killers to do her bidding she offered them sex (one of them was a very young boy). The sex tools were this woman and her daughter.
The men used a shotgun on her husband even as she lay beside him. They used a similar instrument of death to kill the man’s son who was in another room. Investigators later reported that with his dying breath, the husband said that his wife knew the killers.
The United States uses lethal injection. The woman, Theresa Lewis, was reportedly teary-eyed as she was led to her death.
The United States is often recognized as the bastion of democracy. The rest of the world takes its cue from what happens in that country. It was the United States that spawned what became as the Women’s Liberation Movement that saw women fighting to be treated equally as men. The role of the woman as being equal to men was recognized some five decades ago.
Two years ago, sports women in the United States led the campaign for sports women to receive equal pay as the men. In some sports, not least among them Wimbledon, pays the woman fees equal to what they pay men.
So it is that the very United States refuses to discriminate when it comes to punishing the woman. Countries like Guyana, however, have reservations. They actually seem to send the message that women must still be exempt from certain aspects of the law.
We still remember President Cheddi Jagan’s bold pronouncement in the wake of the arrest of a Parika woman who had killed her children. Sections of the public clamoured for the woman’s head but women’s groups immediately pleaded for mercy. The woman had not yet been charged but as soon as she was President Jagan announced that she would not suffer the death penalty.
It was the same with Evelyn Dick, the woman at the centre of a murder in North Ruimveldt. Her actions were almost similar to the woman whom the United States executed on Thursday. She used sex and charm to get a man to kill her husband.
She was convicted of the capital offence but she was never executed. Guyana was not about to execute another woman. The last woman to be executed in Guyana, Ismay Fullington, walked to the gallows for a 1958 ritual killing.
She inveigled her husband to take a neighbour’s child, Lilawattie, to make a sacrifice. The child died in a latrine pit where she was dumped. Guyana seems to send a clear message that while it has no compunction to execute men, women are a different kettle of fish.
There are those who argue that to execute a woman is the ultimate crime since women are responsible for life, are the care-givers and above all, the people who hold families together. But this is not the case in even the democracies.
Some Muslim countries, more recently those that embrace Sharia, kill women for perceived religious crimes such as adultery. They stone them to death.
This execution, the first in five years in the United States will resurrect the debate about the death penalty. But for now, there was hardly a peep from the various human rights organizations. Had Guyana executed a woman, the noise would have been reverberating non-stop.
Indeed, in Guyana, women hold pride of place alongside their male counterparts but this only holds true for some things.

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